But if your site is getting linked to by sketchy sites, this is the first sign that you may be under a negative SEO attack.

How Bad Backlinks Are Affecting Your Rankings

While there are myriad tactics your competitors can use in a negative SEO campaign, by far the most common and effective is linking to your site with bad backlinks.

Why?

No matter how much Google tries to downplay the importance of backlinks year after year, well-designed SEO studies continuously cite backlinks as one of the most important ranking factorsin Google’s search engine algorithm.

And it makes sense: Backlinks are basically one site vouching for another site. If you have an authoritative site linking to yours, Google takes that as a vote of confidence in your site.

Because people recognized the power of backlinks, they started to abuse them. You could pay for other sites to link to yours or “buy links.”

Google took notice of this trend, and tried to put a stop to it with their Penguin Update. The Google Penguin Update was akin to putting a backlink hall monitor in SERPs to support sites with authentic backlinks and penalize those with fake backlinks.

How to Tell If You’ve Been Spam Slammed with Negative SEO

Doing negative SEO takes time and resources, so it’s likely not a worthwhile tactic for most SMBs trying to outperform a competitor.

Just because you’ve received some questionable backlinks doesn’t necessarily mean your site is under direct attack.

Common Reasons for Rankings Drops

If your rankings have dropped and you’re wondering if it’s because of bad backlinks or negative SEO, you should check for these common reasons for lost rankings first.

Lost quality backlinks

It’s possible that you didn’t earn bad backlinks, but that you lost good ones.

Of course, you won’t know what you’ve lost if you’re not tracking your backlinks in the first place.

If you’re signed up with Monitor Backlinks, you’ll get an alert when anything in your backlink profile changes, which includes losing links.

Algorithm updates

Google updates periodically shake up SERPs and rock the SEO world. Check the web to see if what you’re seeing is part of a larger update.

Another possibility is that you’re part of a smaller shake-up—an isolated event where Google’s algorithm is correcting itself.

Try to see if you can figure out which traffic you lost by poring over your Google Analytics, which might be able to help you isolate what happened.

For instance, I was doing SEO for a local business in one of the many “Springfield”s who saw a sudden drop in traffic.

After trying to figure out what happened, we learned that all of the traffic they lost wasn’t traffic that they should’ve been getting in the first place! All of the traffic they lost was traffic they were getting from another “Springfield,” which was irrelevant for their business, and a mistake on Google’s part.

Foreign TLDs: If instead of mostly “.com”s you’re seeing “.xyz” and other sketchy top-level domains, these are likely bad backlinks.

Useless site content: If you check out the actual sites that are backlinking to you and they look completely useless for users, they’re bad backlinks.

Internet underground sites: If you’re being linked to from black market or porn sites, put these on your bad backlinks list.

Number of spammy sites: Getting spammy backlinks now and again isn’t uncommon. However, if you experience a large influx of backlinks from different sites all at one time, this is a strong indicator that you could be a target for negative SEO. It’s not the number of spammy backlinks that matters, but the number of sites they’re coming from—the more, the worse.

Spammy redirects: If there’s spammy or penalized sites redirecting to your site, this is also a strong indicator of negative SEO. You can check what sites have redirects in your Monitor Backlinks account with the “Page with errors/redirects” filter. From there, you can see where those redirects are going.

Analyze Backlink Anchor Text

You can export your backlinks through Monitor Backlinks to manually look over the anchor text of all of your backlinks.

A good backlink profile will have a pretty even mix of exact match, partial match, phrase and branded anchor texts.

So, if you’re seeing significantly more of one type of anchor text (especially exact match, which can be seen as spammy if over-used) used in your backlinks, that could potentially indicate an influx of spam links to your site.

3. Set Up Backlink Alerts for Future Rankings Protection

Monitor Backlinks alerts you of any changes in your backlink profile, including if spammy-looking backlinks are preying on your site, making it easy for you to catch potential threats before they affect your rankings.

Written By

Hillary Patin uses her writing and SEO skills to help businesses grow. She’s the owner and SEO Consultant of Kaylyx, a niche full-service SEO company that boosts growth for cannabis businesses. When she’s not busy as an SEO Consultant, she writes quality content for SEO and personal finance blogs. Her background in behavioral economics and unrelenting curiosity keep her hooked on all things SEO and finance. You can reach her at hillary.patin@gmail.com.